by Val McDermid
Before Kevin could speak, there was a knock at the door. ‘Come in,’ Carol said impatiently.
Stacey hovered on the threshold. ‘Sorry to interrupt, but I just came up with something on Nick Sanders I thought you might both want to hear.’
Carol waved her in. ‘Please tell me you know where he is,’ she said with a half-smile.
Stacey frowned, as if uncertain whether Carol was serious. ‘No. But I do have something that strengthens our case against him. You know he sent us his log from July with that report of the alleged flasher?’
‘When he was being so “helpful”,’ Kevin said, his hands making speech marks in the air.
‘Well, I dug a bit deeper. Guess what? That log was altered within an hour of the first news reports of a body being found in Swindale. He made up that log entry to divert attention away from himself.’ Stacey looked pleased with herself.
‘Thanks, Stacey, that’s really useful. Well done,’ Carol said. As she spoke, Don Merrick stuck his head round the door.
‘Can I come in?’ he asked. Carol nodded. ‘I was looking for Kevin, actually,’ he said. He consulted a sheet of paper. ‘We’ve had an anonymous call from a punter claiming to be a former friend of Nick Sanders. The friendship ended because he caught Sanders taking pictures of his young son in the bath. He kept quiet at the time because he didn’t want his kid being put through the ordeal of an investigation, but when a mate who works for the Peak Park told him Sanders was a suspect and that he’d legged it, he decided to come forward. Anyway, he reckoned Sanders would head for open country. He’s got the skills to live off the land. Apparently there’s a place in Sutherland, in the north-west of Scotland–Achmelvich Bay,’ he said, stumbling over the unfamiliar name. ‘Sanders was the warden at the Youth Hostel there years ago. We checked that out, by the way. It’s on the CV he submitted to the Ranger Service. Anyway, according to our caller, Sanders spoke about something called the Hermit’s Castle. He couldn’t remember much about it except that some guy from London built it right out on the headland. Like a concrete pillbox, only smaller. Lived in it for a year, wouldn’t speak to a soul. The caller said Sanders might head for there. I think we should check it out,’ Merrick concluded eagerly.
‘It’s a pretty long shot,’ Carol said.
Kevin made a noncommittal gesture. ‘We could ask the local boys to keep an eye out.’
‘If he worked up there, he probably knows the local boys,’ Merrick pointed out. ‘I think Kevin should go. There’s a flight to Inverness at noon.’
Carol considered for a moment, then shook her head. ‘It’s too insubstantial. Kevin, speak to the local lads, ask them to check it out. But discreetly, yes? If there’s any trace of Sanders, we’ll follow it up. In the meantime, we concentrate on getting an appeal out nationally. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got a briefing to prepare.’
There was pitifully little to impart at the morning briefing. And they all knew it. The determination of the morning before was tinged with desperation. They all knew that with every passing hour the chances of finding Paula alive diminished dramatically.
‘We’ll continue to follow up on the council-tax data,’ Carol said, trying to keep the energy in her voice high. ‘I want us to speak to every landlord and tenant within the search area on the map here. I know it’s a scattergun approach, but until we have something to narrow it down, we will do whatever it takes to find Paula. Inspector Merrick has the full list of assignments for today. In addition, I want you to ask in every interview whether the subject has ever heard anyone referred to as the Creeper.’ She was conscious of a dubious stirring in the room.
I’m aware it sounds bizarre. But this is good information. Derek Tyler has said nothing for two years. While it’s possible he may have mischief in mind, Dr Hill is inclined to think he hasn’t the wit to mislead us on this. So bear it in mind.
The good news from forensics is that we do have DNA. Unfortunately, the sample is not of sufficiently high quality to run it for comparison against the national database.’ Groans all round. ‘However,’ she said, raising her voice, ‘it’s good enough for elimination purposes. And I’m told that if we do get the right person, there will be enough common ground for it to have evidential value.’
She turned and pointed to the large-scale map of Temple Fields. ‘She’s there somewhere. So let’s find Paula.’
As the briefing ended, officers moved in clusters towards Don Merrick, who looked as if he hadn’t slept in this lifetime. ‘Sam,’ Carol called over the hubbub. He turned and gave her an enquiring look. ‘A moment, please.’
He wove his way against the tide to her side. ‘Yes, ma’am?’ he said smartly.
‘I want you to pull the files on the cases from two years back.’
‘The Derek Tyler murders?’
‘That’s right. Once we’d arrested Tyler, everything else came to a halt. You and I are going to have a very boring morning going over those files and identifying any actions that were slated but never followed up.’
Evans tried to look enthusiastic. It wasn’t convincing. Before Carol could say anything, she saw John Brandon’s familiar figure moving through the press of bodies. He was plotting a course straight for her. ‘Off you go, Sam,’ she said firmly.
Brandon reached her and steered her to one side. ‘Carol, is Tony fully abreast of the investigation?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘I think we need a formal profile from him. I’ve got a press conference at noon and I’d like to give them something that makes it look as if we’re making a degree of forward movement. Especially since we’ve lost Nick Sanders,’ he added acerbically.
She tried not to smart under the implied criticism. ‘Can we give them some of the video footage? To see if anyone recognizes the man?’
‘I don’t see why not. Whether they’ll use it is another matter. The media care a lot less about a police officer at risk than we do. They’re more excited about having a serial killer in their midst than they are about saving DC McIntyre.’ Brandon moved away, taking the time to dole out some words of encouragement as he headed back to the relative peace of his office.
Carol looked around to see which of her officers was nearest. ‘Jan?’ she called.
Jan looked up from the sheaf of papers she was reading, caught Carol’s eye and came over. ‘Something for me?’
‘Can you track down Dr Hill and get him to come over?’
‘Sure. Have you got his mobile number?’
Carol reached for a piece of paper and scribbled it down. As she wrote, she said, ‘He’ll either have it turned off or he’ll ignore it, though. I’m giving you his home address as well. I think he said he’d be there this morning.’
‘And if he’s not there?’
Carol shrugged. ‘Try Bradfield Moor.’
Jan smiled. ‘Like calling to like, eh?’
Carol bridled. It was precisely the sort of thing she would have said to Tony herself. But that was the prerogative of a friend, not the kind of sly remark she wanted to hear from her junior officers. ‘We need him more than he needs us, Sergeant. Let’s not forget that, eh?’
Jan shrugged an apology and left. Merrick approached Carol and ran a hand over hair greasy from lack of washing. Hollow-eyed, he stared at her bleakly over the rim of his mug, one leg jittering with nervous energy. ‘I keep feeling there must be something else we should be doing,’ he said, his voice gravelly with exhaustion.
‘I know. But it’s hard to imagine what that could be. And it’s not going to help anyone if you drive yourself into the ground over this, Don,’ she said gently.
She saw anger spurt into his eyes. ‘Paula’s not just one of my officers,’ he said tightly. ‘She’s my friend. I know that might seem odd. I know most people can’t get their heads round the idea of a woman and a man being mates. But that’s how it is with us.’
And yet you didn’t know she was gay, Carol thought. That probably said as much about Paula’s instinctive caution as
it did about Merrick’s lack of insight. ‘I believe you, Don,’ she said. ‘And I do understand how that makes it harder on you.’
‘Do you?’ He shook his head. ‘She was like a dog with two tails when she got the posting to the squad, you know? She was excited about working with you. Ever since the Thorpe case, you’ve been her hero. That’s why she agreed to the undercover even though it freaked her out. She wanted you to think well of her. She was determined that anything you could do, she could do too.’
His words cut Carol to the quick, even though she understood he was lashing out to ease his own guilty sense of failure. ‘I think she was doing it for herself, Don. Not to impress me, but to keep faith with her own idea of what a cop should be,’ she said. ‘But whatever Paula’s motives, there’s no point in chucking blame around. We’ve got to concentrate on finding her.’
‘You think I don’t know that? But what’s to concentrate on? There’s hundreds of bits of paper there, and they all say the same shit. It’s like she vanished into thin air.’
‘We’re getting there. We’re narrowing down the possibilities all the time. We’ve covered a huge amount of ground in Temple Fields. According to your own figures, we’ve physically been inside more than seventy-five per cent of all the properties in the area. It comes down to time and method.’
He sighed. ‘I know. I’m not thinking straight. Look, ma’am, if you don’t mind, I’m going to take off and get some sleep. I’ll check into a motel, get my head down for a few hours.’
‘Good idea, Don. It won’t look so bleak once you’ve slept.’
He turned away without a word and shambled off. It was only half past nine, but Carol felt she’d already done a day’s work. When she’d taken on the challenge of a specialist squad, she hadn’t considered quite how tiring it would be to spend her days trying to corral a bunch of cops whose natural abilities made them as difficult and bolshie as she’d been herself in her younger days. Sometimes, she found herself almost longing for Traffic.
The grounds at Bradfield Moor had not been designed for anything other than easy maintenance. But on a wintry morning, with the leaves off the trees, they offered a long vista across the moors to the north through the tall chainlink fence. It was possible to lose sight of the city below, to cut one’s connections to the life of the streets. To walk there with a patient wasn’t generally an option that staff were encouraged to take, but Tony had decided Tom Storey would only benefit from a short respite away from the oppressive surroundings of the hospital. They’d been out in the open for the best part of an hour, taking stock of Tom’s most pressing current concerns.
They had come to a halt among a stand of birch trees, close to the fence, looking across the valley at the sparkle of a reservoir on the moors. Tony checked his watch. ‘We should probably head back. I’ve got another appointment in a quarter of an hour.’
With one last look at the landscape, they turned back towards the ugly Victorian Gothic pile. ‘I’m glad you came today,’ Storey said.
‘We had an appointment. Where else would I be?’
‘I thought your police business might keep you away.’
‘My patients come first with me. I work with the police, but that doesn’t give them the power to dictate my movements.’
Storey gave him an odd look. ‘That’s a funny way to put it.’
‘It is, isn’t it? I suppose it’s because I’ve been thinking a lot about power this morning.’
They walked in silence for a couple of minutes, then Tony said, ‘What’s your line on power, Tom?’
Twin lines formed between Storey’s eyebrows as he tried to find a way to express what he felt. He was finding it less easy to communicate his thoughts now. ‘You take it where you find it,’ he said. ‘It’s always circumstantial. One man’s power means another man’s pathos.’
Tony stopped in his tracks. He wasn’t quite sure how, but something in Tom Storey’s words had triggered an idea in his head. He spoke so softly his patient had to strain to hear him. ‘You look at the overpowered, there’s a direct line back to the oppressor…’ Tony raised his face to the sky. ‘Find the thread, you find the killer.’ He turned to Storey and smiled beatifically. ‘Thank you, Tom. Thank you for that beautiful thought. I do believe I’m starting to see the light.’
But the light had to wait. As he’d said, Tony had another patient to see, a patient whose psychosis required the full focus of his attention. An hour later, he finally emerged from his office, head down, paying no attention to his surroundings. He was vaguely aware of shapes passing him, but he was almost at the end of the corridor when something penetrated his consciousness. He stopped and frowned, looking round impatiently as a voice repeated its Bugs Bunny impersonation.
Jan Shields was leaning against the wall outside his office, grinning. ‘I said, “Nya…What’s up, Doc?”’
He felt a quick surge of apprehension then dismissed it. If something bad had happened, she wouldn’t be clowning with him. ‘Don’t give up the day job,’ he said, walking back towards her.
‘I wouldn’t dream of it. I like it far too much.’
He drew abreast. ‘Something happened?’
She pushed off from the wall. ‘No. That’s the trouble. Mr Brandon wants a profile. That way he’ll have something to feed the reptiles. I’m here to drive you back. Shall we?’ She gestured towards the main corridor and fell into step beside him.
‘How did you know where I was? And that I didn’t have my own car?’
She winked at him. ‘I’m a detective.’
‘What I do with my life isn’t exactly a secret. You asked Carol.’
Jan smiled. ‘When your car was at the house and you weren’t, I called Carol. She said you’d probably have left the lights on. Or run out of petrol. So I called here.’
When they emerged in the car park, Tony was surprised to see they were heading not for a nondescript saloon car but a low-slung Japanese sports two-seater. ‘Nice to see Bradfield CID taking care of their officers,’ he said, bending to fold himself into the passenger seat.
‘You really do have a weird sense of humour, Dr Hill,’ Jan said.
‘Tony, please.’ He gasped as she floored the accelerator and sped out into the narrow lane.
‘So, what’s in it for you?’ Jan asked as she rattled through the gears.
‘In what?’ he said, confused.
‘The nutters in Bradfield Moor. Why bother? You could spend your life profiling and teaching. Why earn a pittance dealing with the dregs?’
He thought for a moment. ‘Hope,’ he said finally.
‘That’s it? Hope?’
‘Don’t underestimate the power of hope. And besides,’ he added, ‘I’m good at it. There’s a satisfaction in doing something you know you do better than most people in the field. Don’t you find?’
She drove fast into a tight bend, throwing him against the door. ‘Thanks for the implied compliment,’ she said. ‘And do they help you with your current profiling cases, your nutters?’
He grinned. ‘Oddly enough, I place more trust in my own judgement. Which is not to say they don’t occasionally offer an accidental insight.’
‘Any insights today, then?’
Tony shook his head. ‘Just a timely reminder that I really should have been looking more closely at victims. And what links them.’
‘That’s easy. They were all whores.’
‘Apart from Paula.’
Jan pulled up at the junction with the main road and took the opportunity to give him a puzzled stare. ‘But she looked like a whore.’
‘If looks could kill, they probably will.’ He smiled at her bafflement. ‘There’s something else they have in common.’
‘What’s that?’
‘If your mission as a killer was cleaning up the streets, you might think getting rid of cops was as socially useful as getting rid of prostitutes. But of course that would only make sense if Paula was a bent cop…’
‘There’s more
than one way of being bent.’
‘Ah, yes, I’d heard you produced that revelation. Don Merrick seemed a bit put out at the notion.’
This time, there was no warmth in Jan’s smile. ‘It’s so predictable, isn’t it? Pretty girl like that, how could she be a dyke?’
‘Still, you picked up on it,’ Tony said. ‘But then, I suppose you would.’
‘Meaning what?’ she said.
‘Takes one to know one. Isn’t that what they say?’
She flashed a quick glance at him. ‘What makes you think I’m gay?’
‘Is it supposed to be a secret?’
Jan blew a raspberry. ‘Shrink’s trick. Answer the question: what makes you think I’m gay?’
Because of the way you are with Carol, he thought, but was not prepared to say it because of what it would reveal about himself. He paused for a moment, finding another way of saying the same thing. ‘Because of the way you are with men.’
‘You think I hate men? What a cliché.’
‘That’s not what I said. You treat all of us with exactly the same mixture of amusement and charm and disdain. It doesn’t matter if we’re attractive or ugly, bright or dim, you don’t differentiate. You’re not interested in us beyond our professional interactions. It could be that you’re one of those people who’s just not interested in sex with either gender, but I don’t think so. I sense a certain sexual charisma there. Does that answer your question?’
She slowed down and looked across at him. ‘Thank you for taking it seriously. You’re right, as it happens. And I’m right about Paula.’
‘And you thought it was fair to out her?’ Tony asked, curious rather than combative.
‘Hey, you’re the one saying we should be looking at every aspect of the victims. You think it matters? That she’s gay?’
‘I never gave it a moment’s thought. It never seemed relevant,’ he said indifferently.